Editors’ Choice: The Turing Point

by Scott B. Weingart - April 21, 2016

Below is some crazy, uninformed ramblings about the least-complex possible way to trick someone into thinking a computer is a human, for the purpose of history research. I’d love some genuine AI/Machine Intelligence researchers to point me to the actual discussions on the subject. These aren’t original thoughts; they spring from countless sci-fi novels and AI research from the ’70s-’90s. Humanists beware: this is super sci-fi speculative, but maybe an interesting thought experiment. If someone’s chatting with a computer, but doesn’t realize her conversation partner isn’t human, that computer passes the Turing Test. Unrelatedly, if a robot or piece of art is just close enough to reality to be creepy, but not close enough to be convincingly real, it lies in the Uncanny Valley. I argue there is a useful concept in the simplest possible computer which is still convincingly human, and that computer will be at the Turing Point.